LOL Kijanki, funny last comment on your latest post. It is not necessarily that I want to convert everyone to my beliefs, in fact there is more good vinyl for me if they don't! I am just trying to explain my own point of view. As always, it depends on what one's personal sonic priorities are. Those who place eliminating surface noise as their highest priority will of course always go the digital route.
I have never been involved with an orchestral recording session that did not involve multiple mikes. Even for my orchestra's archival recordings, which are broadcast on the local classical station, they use at least eight. I am not sure why this came about, either; as you say it doesn't really make any sense. I think it may be a case of "because they can." It also gives the recording engineer MUCH more personal control over what the end result of his mixing sounds like (as well as being much easier to edit - any idiot can make a recording with a laptop now). They almost never listen to what the musicians have to say about it, even the conductors nowadays very rarely get involved in what the actual end product actually sounds like. It's a crying shame, really. Technology winning out over aesthetics yet again.
Frank, your "thought experiment," unless I am mistaken somehow, is the exact experiment I was talking about having made several times, most recently about a year and a half ago. I am also not sure how you can conclude that a recording must have worked right without playing it back...
To put a finer point on this, I could agree that digital can decently capture the experience you mention (Beethoven 7 several rows back), this I am not denying; my argument is that an analog recording will capture it much better yet. Again, it depends on what your sonic priorities are. If one's priority is to recreate the timbre of the instrument, especially it's overtones, and the ambient noise of the room along with it, then yes, the analog recording was indeed markedly superior every time. Digital processing simply removes too many overtones from the very complex timbres of most acoustic instruments - something many designers are still trying to solve. Unfortunately, though in other aspects the technology has markedly improved, in this particular area (which is of course fundamental to musicians, who work very hard to get as close as possible to the exact sound they want) there has been very little, if any progress since the technology was invented.
I have never been involved with an orchestral recording session that did not involve multiple mikes. Even for my orchestra's archival recordings, which are broadcast on the local classical station, they use at least eight. I am not sure why this came about, either; as you say it doesn't really make any sense. I think it may be a case of "because they can." It also gives the recording engineer MUCH more personal control over what the end result of his mixing sounds like (as well as being much easier to edit - any idiot can make a recording with a laptop now). They almost never listen to what the musicians have to say about it, even the conductors nowadays very rarely get involved in what the actual end product actually sounds like. It's a crying shame, really. Technology winning out over aesthetics yet again.
Frank, your "thought experiment," unless I am mistaken somehow, is the exact experiment I was talking about having made several times, most recently about a year and a half ago. I am also not sure how you can conclude that a recording must have worked right without playing it back...
To put a finer point on this, I could agree that digital can decently capture the experience you mention (Beethoven 7 several rows back), this I am not denying; my argument is that an analog recording will capture it much better yet. Again, it depends on what your sonic priorities are. If one's priority is to recreate the timbre of the instrument, especially it's overtones, and the ambient noise of the room along with it, then yes, the analog recording was indeed markedly superior every time. Digital processing simply removes too many overtones from the very complex timbres of most acoustic instruments - something many designers are still trying to solve. Unfortunately, though in other aspects the technology has markedly improved, in this particular area (which is of course fundamental to musicians, who work very hard to get as close as possible to the exact sound they want) there has been very little, if any progress since the technology was invented.
